UC Riverside

What does it mean to narrate the human condition when it is forced to confront militarization, occupation, and displacement? What does it mean to author experiences violently constrained by settler colonialism? Furthermore, what does it mean to engage in such practices using digital media? Reflecting on these questions, my dissertation explores the affirming ways Palestinians narrate their experiences using new and digital media, communicating what I refer to as a digital poetic. In my work, I illustrate how a digital poetic reveals technomediated possibilities for Palestinian sociality not foreclosed by the disembodying and death-making logics of settler colonialism, militarization, occupation, or displacement. I take as my point of departure the impossibility of narration advanced by Edward Said in his essay, “Permission to Narrate” (1984). Said highlights obstacles to narrating a Palestinian experience due to the pejorative powers of Israel and the West’s “disciplinary communication apparatus.” In attending to Said’s call for a Palestinian-authored narration, my dissertation advances a decolonial feminist reading practice illuminating an exclusively Palestinian sociality unconcerned with externalized validation and unrestricted by the disciplinary powers of the state.

To undertake this work, my project first outlines a poetics of refusal, by centering Palestinian examples of life-making, life-preserving, and life-affirming practices. To illustrate this, I first engage with the writings of contemporary Arab women writers Etel Adnan, Adania Shibli, and Suheir Hammad to articulate a poetics of refusal that gives rise to a grammatology of an embodied sociality. Then, to exemplify the layered textures of a Palestinian digital poetic, I turn my attention to the 2020 Palestine Writes Literature Festival. Taking place over five days and accessible on the festival’s “Virtual Venue,” social media sites including YouTube and Instagram, Palestine Writes is a celebratory invitation into Palestinian life, culture, and futurity. Untethered by the settler-colonial state’s “disciplinary communication apparatus,” the festival’s literary, cultural, political, and experiential presentations of Palestinian life offer a new language of resistance. These digital poetics not only unearth new publics capable of examining power, but also birth new ways of existing and knowing for those who produce them and those who engage them.